Monthly Archives: May 2016

I started my perfuming career as a natural perfumer, actually I was studying aromatherapy and had a nice little following in my area (this was before the internet). The name of the company was Possets and I sold my perfume in one store which was opened one night a month! Nevertheless, the desire was there for great quality natural perfume and I was filling a need. Fast forward many years, and I am still making and selling 100% Natural perfume,and there is still a need.

I find it more difficult to come up with a great natural blend for several natural reasons! First, the quality of a batch of essential oils can vary wildly from one year to another. Rose oil is a real “crap shoot” with the same vendor and origin being divine one year and meh the next. I think this is either due to growing conditions, political unrest, adulteration of a bad year’s essential oil by second rate “extender” essential oils, the vendor changes hands and the new owners don’t take as much care as the original owners did, labor shortages (especially for essential oils which are very labor intense like enflourage), and diseases of the plants which produce the oils.

Another reason why it’s hard to produce a great natural perfume is that the consumer demands certain scents and some of them cannot really be mimicked in natural ingredients. I have never smelled a successful “modern hard musk” natural for instance. They just don’t come that aggressive; by nature, naturals are softer and more emollient. To try to make a natural into a modern is like making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.

There is a smaller number of notes from which to draw. With man mades, the sky is the limit. With naturals, you have a very finite number of elements you can add to the perfume. Several hundred elements might seem like a wonderful great field on which to play, but when you are used to fine tuning with thousands of accords, you feel like you are in a straight jacket.

Well, with all those caveats, why do I still make 100% Naturals? They are the BEST when it comes to the classic blends. You can’t beat a natural chypre, there is just something magic and perfect about a perfume like The Observatory, it’s the difference between lovingly polished old wood and perfect reproduction Pergo.

100% Naturals are a challenge which often makes me consider a combination which I would have never ever tried. I got some red cedar essential oil which made me start daydreaming about “dancing partners” for it. A great essential can be a wild springboard for creativity.

Ofttimes, you will get something in essential oil, etc., which you will never ever find among the man made accords. I got something called muhuhu and fell in love. What does it smell like? It is the exact scent of a glossy paged hard bound comic book I had when I was a child. It was only printed in black and white and I just loved to smell the pages, they were so exotic. Maybe there was muhuhu oil used in the inks, or the processing of the paper but that smell has stayed with me as a comforting and pleasant scent and now I can use it in my work. No man made maker in their right mind is going to use that in their work, and I can only find it in the naturals.

Please note that Possets Perfume is Vegan and Never Ever Tested On Animals. We are also proud to say that we are transitioning over from any plastic containers to all glass, better for everyone and everything from every point of view. To find out more of the good stuff we are doing, please visit our FAQS on https://possets.com.

Great fun burning Eastern incense. Here are some things you will need to do just that. One is sort of surprising!

Fabienne Christenson has visited Dubai and the perfume market in Dubai. She has collected bakhoor, burned it, had long conversations with citizens of the United Arab Emirates about it, and has a few interesting asides. This blog will probably amuse you highly. Also, the series The Elements of Scent will continue as well. In the meantime, take a look at the main Possets site where there is plenty of Eastern (Oriental) inspired perfume as well as those of the West. Http://www.possets.com

Like this:

Now that you know how to get the charcoal started, it’s time to put a bit of incense on the fire and see what happens. In this video I will show you the proper way to burn frankincense without letting it get acrid from exposure to too high heat. Burning bakhoor will also be explored and I will show you my favorite kind of bakhoor, too.

Fabienne Christenson has visited Dubai and the perfume market in Dubai. She has collected bakhoor, burned it, had long conversations with citiznes of the United Arab Emirates about it, and has a few interesting asides. This blog will probably amuse you highly. Also, the series The Elements of Scent will continue as well. In the meantime, take a look at the main Possets site where there is plenty of Eastern (Oriental) inspired perfume as well as those of the West. Http://www.possets.com

Like this:

Burning bakoor is an art. You have to have the right equipment and know a couple of tricks to do it right. Once you try this, however, you will experience the real idea of Eastern perfumery, the oldest form of scenting there is. No education of a perfumer is complete without burning the real thing and learning to appreciate the smooth, animalic, smokey, sexy scent of good bakoor. Watch this first video and learn how to get started!

Fabienne Christenson has visited Dubai and the perfume market in Dubai. She has collected bakhoor, burned it, had long conversations with citiznes of the United Arab Emirates about it, and has a few interesting asides. This blog will probably amuse you highly. Also, the series The Elements of Scent will continue as well. In the meantime, take a look at the main Possets site where there is plenty of Eastern (Oriental) inspired perfume as well as those of the West. Http://www.possets.com

Like this:

Bakhoor is an incense made of wood chips and deeply infused with essential oils and fragrance oils. The wood chips are oude in the more expensive sorts of bakhoor, and a mixture of cedar or varietal hardwoods and some oude in the less expensive sorts of bakhoor. Yes, that is very expensive and so plan to pay a lot of money for first class bakhoor.

Most of the good bakhoor will come to you in a nice box and you get a lot of it. You only need to burn a very small amount of it because it smokes fabulously and the scent is extremely heavy. Proceed with caution and start with a small burn and then work up or else you will be setting off smoke detectors and have your neighbors hating you.

The scent of bakhoor is very obviously not Western. In the West, for all our love of foodies and florals, we are pretty bitter compared to the perfumes of the East which I could characterize as more emollient and sweet. Once you smell bakhoor, you will know what I mean.

Rose, patchouli, jasmine, and black musk are all common ingredients in a good bakhoor. The rose essential oils really vary a lot and a good Arabian perfumer will play with them like an accomplished cellist plays his instrument. I have smelled sweet rose, sweaty rose, lemony rose, and black rose bakhoor. Each of them give the middle note a good twist and keeps the fragrance interesting.

Next, what is the proper way to burn bakhoor, there is a trick or two to it.

Fabienne Christenson has visited Dubai and the perfume market in Dubai. She has collected bakhoor, burned it, had long conversations with Emirates about it, and has a few interesting asides about it. This blog will probably amuse you highly. Also, the series The Elements of Scent will continue as well. In the meantime, take a look at the main Possets site where there is plenty of Eastern (Oriental) inspired perfume as well as those of the West. Http://www.possets.com

Like this:

You have heard, of course, that the word “perfume” means through smoke. That is pretty much the first thing anyone tells you about perfumery and they always expect that you are shocked, stunned, and in awe of that rare and esoteric piece of information. You have had that point hammered into you from the day you picked up your first book on aromatherapy and it’s in the first 3 paragraphs of every other book on scent you have ever read. Yea, yea, yea. Well, the first way anyone ever perfumed anything was by exposing it to smoking fragrant woods and resins. Today you could expect to see Arab gentlemen gathering in a majalis to talk and negotiate and the entire visit follows a time honored choreography of greeting, drinking coffee, who speaks and when and who does not, and the last act is that each of the participants have their clothing smoked with bakhoor, infused with the strong and hypnotic fragrances of the East. So, there is something in the idea of smoke infusion being the method of making fragrant.

But what is this bakhoor? How do Eastern perfumes differ from Western ones? Is there a common thread running through them? How do you use Bakhoor? Where do you get bakhoor? And is there liquid perfume which exhibits the same allure of incense? And, is there any accessory to make incensing your world easier?

Possets will explore these questions and more. So, keep your eye on this space because we are going to take a trip through the ancient souks of Dubai and the Emirates, heart of the perfuming business in Arabia!

Fabienne Christenson has visited Dubai and the perfume market in Dubai. She has collected bakhoor, burned it, had long conversations with Emirates about it, and has a few interesting asides about it. This blog will probably amuse you highly. Also, the series The Elements of Scent will continue as well. In the meantime, take a look at the main Possets site where there is plenty of Eastern (Oriental) inspired perfume as well as those of the West. Http://www.possets.com